9Aug 04

Some months ago, an old friend and part-time Londoner had a Canadian colleague of hers over for a visit. My friend asked him what he’d like to see. “London Square” came the reply.

Unsure about what to do, my friend took her visitor on a tour of some squares she thought he might have meant: Trafalgar Square, Parliament Square, Leicester Square, you get the idea. It was good: they saw some of London and had fun.

No satisfaction was found on the London Square issue, though, until the next day, on the way from Victoria to Fitzrovia to watch the opening game of Euro 2004 in the pub. Skirting Piccadilly Circus, our guest said: “THIS IS THE PLACE! What’s it called again?”

Maybe we should have known. It’s just that Piccadilly Circus seems an odd place to be so iconic: it’s cramped and not very exciting. I suppose it has flashing lights…

Film 2Oh!!: Steven Malkmus Covering Crazy Town 12 Apr 2011 I’ve seen 73 films this year and have written about 7 of them. Can I catch up? 7: Pavement Butterfly (Großstadtschmetterling) (British Silent Film Festival) I'm pretty oblivious and forthright…

Party responsibly and don’t exaggerate! 14 May 2010 Your intrepid FT correspondents are today embarking upon an ambitious endeavour! The London Borough Orgabooze is a semi-competitive points-based race around London, whereby teams of up to 4 people visit…

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4 Sep 2009
#543, 15th December 1984, video “Do They Know It’s Christmas” is significant in one way, and insignificant in another. First, it raised a lot of awareness and money and established the pop single as an excellent mechanism for doing those things. This was significant. Gargantuan “supergroups” like this fell out of favour but charity records […]

25 Jul 2006
Or: Games I Have Known. For the sake of my patience and yours, I have mostly restricted this to games I either owned or played – ones where I read a friends’ rulebooks and only dimly remember have been ignored, with a couple of notable exceptions. If you want to know more about any of these, […]

8 Aug 2008
#426, 23rd September 1978 On one level the ‘plot’ of “Dreadlock Holiday” is hugely important to any judgement of it. On another, not at all, but let’s recap anyway. The narrator is a tourist in Jamaica – he gets mugged for his silver chain and returns to the comfort of his hotel where a woman […]

3 Sep 2007
Mars Planets: the atomisation of the Mars Bar. An entropic dis-integration, the tendency of all things to become more chaotic, in confectionery form. I’m trying to resist the impulse to tie this stuff up to no-such-thing-as-Society atomisation because that’s not how we do things, right? And Mars Planets are better to share than a proper big […]

30 Dec 2005
#222, 20th August 1966 DIGRESSION: For Christmas I got Never Had It So Good, the first part of Dominic Sandbrook’s huge new history of Britain in the sixties. Here’s what he says about the project: “This book seeks to rescue ‘from the enormous condescencion of prosperity’…the lives of the kind of people who spent the […]

5 Jul 2013
#725, 26th August 1995 BOXING? A “heavyweight battle”, the NME cover-billed it. And if “Country House” vs Oasis’ “Roll With It” was a title bout, the music press were desperate to play Frank Warren. Perhaps they had most at stake. It was, in a way, their last great fight. Many other moments define Oasis. Blur […]

5 May 2011
#667, 13th July 1991 Sixteen Listens For Sixteen Weeks: An Everything I Do Liveblog This song got to number one for 16 weeks, so I decided to play it 16 times in a row, writing as I went. Play 1: And we’re off. I’ve honestly hardly heard this in the last twenty years so I […]

27 Mar 2014
#774, 20th September 1997 Every Popular entry starts with the same question: why this record? This time it’s especially loud. “Candle In The Wind ‘97” is the highest-selling single of all time in the UK, almost 2 million clear of its nearest competitor. This is as big as pop gets. But “why?” might strike you […]